Barbara Smoker's EGOTISTICAL ANNUAL
NEWSLETTER, XMAS 2012
Now halfway through my ninetieth
year, I have yet to decide what I want to be when I grow up.
In my early teens I knew: I was
going to be a nun -- not a "half-nun", as one of my Catholic aunts
called the sisters who were responsible for my education, but a member
of a
proper contemplative order. Fast forward to my wartime late teens,
when,
serving king and country as a wireless telegraphist with the Eastern
fleet, I
was not so sure. I thought I would be a great writer; then, in my early
twenties, flattered by rave notices for acting in amateur dramatics, I
became
stage-struck. I got a job with a touring company, but backed out on
realising
what a hard life it would be.
In my mid-twenties I began writing
polemical articles, especially on religion - but they hardly qualified
as great
writing. I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and then
Bertrand
Russell's Committee of a Hundred, dedicated to direct action. I often
found
myself in criminal courts, and took part in a memorable adventure in
Jugoslavia. I made a corner in transcribing Bernard Shaw's shorthand
drafts for
scholars, manuscript dealers, and others, and am still active in the
Shaw
Society - but that hardly constitutes a career. For 25 years I was
elected
president of the National Secular Society, which opened a lot of doors
to me,
including radio, TV, and speaking
tours of America and India.
In 1970 I began officiating
at
religious funerals and I must have done
some two thousand in the next forty years.
(Nowadays, at a three-figure fee each I would have made a small fortune
- but
at first, following HJ Blackham's example, I charged only £5!)
Then the British Humanist Association got me to train
aspiring funeral
officiants (as the first humanist ceremonies tutor), but how could I
(unaccredited!) have charged a fee for that?
In 1972 Ward Lock
Educational Ltd.
commissioned me to write a paperback book on Humanism for , secondary
schools.
Being still in print, in its fifth edition; this must be my most
successful
endeavour, along with my series of irreverent greeting cards, which for
the
past forty-odd years have at least made people laugh - and possibly
think. In 1981 I was elected
chairman of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (now euphemistically
re-named
Dignity in Dying, with, sadly, weakened aims), and I held that office
five
years. But I have yet to embark on my life's work.
So what of the past twelve months?
I have won prizes in a few magazine literary competitions, adding The
Oldie to
my list. More seriously, towards the end of last year I began writing
an
article for the Freethinker, under the celebrated cribbed title "Life, the Universe and
Everything", in which I built on an idea in my article "The God
Hypothesis", which had appeared in the Ethical Record six months
earlier -
the idea that nothing basically divides the theist from the atheist (at
least
with regard to the cosmological argument) apart from the former's
irrationally
attributing consciousness, will, and purpose to
a quite probable eternal “uncaused first cause".
I was drafting that article when,
on 13 December, physicists working in Geneva on the collision of
sub-atomic
particles in the Large Hadron Collider announced that they were on the
verge of
locating "the God particle" - more technically called the Higgs
boson. So I wove this information into the article, and it comprised
the
central spread of February's Freethinker.
The summer issue of The Shavian
included an article I wrote on having transcribed Shaw's shorthand for
decades.
And when The Spectator ran a competition for verses that anticipated
the
Olympic Games, I happened to unearth an entry that had won me a prize
in a
similar competition in 1956, which, with the venue changed from
Helbourne to
London, won me another prize! (Is it immoral to plagiarise from one's
younger
self?) Other prize¬winning competition entries during the year have
appeared in
the New Statesman, Spectator, Oldie, and Literary Review.
A gift I received last Xmas was a
copy of "The Atheist's Guide to Christmas", which, though published a
couple of years earlier, had somehow passed me by. One of its 42
contributors
was Richard Dawkins - whose piece is a clever take on the
Wooster/Jeeves
stories. It had me laughing aloud. As a Wodehouse devotee (not so much
for his
plots or humour as for his superb mastery of the English language), I
thought
Dawkins got the tone just right. I have always admired his more serious
work,
but this departure boosted him in my estimation.
Later I came across another most
interesting book, “Through the Language Glass” by Guy
Deutscher,on linguistics
and the way that different languages affect their native speakers' view
of the
natural world. It is written in very amusing (as well as very readable)
English, and I highly recommend it.
Following the NSS's judicial
victory early this year banning pubic prayers dur1ng local council
meetings the
Government (in the Portly person of Eric Pickles) actually attempted to
nul11fy
it by incit1ng councils to persist with the now illegal prayers and to
plead
the new Localisation Act in justification.
At the end of April the inland
postage rose astronomically -. Especially the price of a a stamp for
sending by
second-class ma1l ~ minimum size-and-weight letter or postcard. Now 50p
that is
a pre-decimal ten shillings! In fact, six decades ag0 the printed-rate
postage
was only a ha’penny - just one-240th the new iniquitous cost,
exceeding the inflation
rate many times over. It is a tax on us oldies with no access to
e-mail.
I am promised not one, but two,
90th-birthday lunch parties (presumably because a 100th is deemed
unlikely) -
one to be give~ by the South Place Ethical Society at Conway Hall on
the day
itself. (Sunday 2nd June at lpm - please note), the other the preceding
day,
arranged by my sister Janet, for members of our large extended family.
So I've
got to survive till then.
All the best - and God be-less!
Barbara Smoker
51
Farmfield Road, Bromley Kent BRl 4NF - Website:
www.barbara.smoker.freeuk.com